Passionate About Her Subject

The following work of fiction contains some sexually explicit content. All depicted characters are 18 or older.

SYNOPSIS: Scott wakes up in the captivity of an attractive sex researcher, but he's confident that he can keep his foot and tickling fetishes secret.

Originally posted June 2008

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The important thing at the moment, is...

Scott's mind felt unbalanced as he tried to rationalize the panic away, but instead of being away, it seemed to slosh around inside his head, and obscure his ability to construct the sentence.

The important thing at the moment, is... to...

He pulled a bit, with his right arm. Perhaps, he thought, it will move this time. He was able to tug on the muscle, but the arm was strapped firmly down. The other arm mirrored it. Lying down as he was, he imagined he must look like one of those people who would cheer at the game, with his arms thrust straight above his head and frozen that way.

... don't worry about anything.

He felt extremely bare in this position. What was he even doing in this room? He found the panic was settling, and the words in his mind settled with it.

The important thing at the moment is not to worry.

This was the first time Scott had woken up in a room without remembering how he'd arrived there. Why wasn't he wearing his pyjamas? Where were his pyjamas?

This is very weird.

Surely, this would all be explained in time. He reminded himself that patience was all he needed, and set his mind to work on determining his location. The room was white. He couldn't see the floor, restrained as he was. His ankles and toes felt trapped. He gave his spread legs a tug, and the straps pulled back even harder. It was the same feeling of inarguable entrapment he had experienced when he was younger, and his babysitter sat with her full weight on his legs.

Before he could make any more progress, his attention was refocused in alarm. He tilted his neck and looked at the closed door. There were footsteps in the hall. They were coming closer.

Scott felt himself sweat. Who was coming? Surely they would be able to explain. Or, perhaps they would walk right by. Yes, that would be it. The probability that anybody walking down a hall would enter any single room was low. He relaxed, and waited for the sound of the footsteps to pass by the door and begin to fade away again.

But the sound stopped. And then Scott heard the door click.

His words had not discriminated by gender, but he was shocked out of his stream of consciousness when he saw that the face of the entrant was a female one. Not just female -- as his sensory data had told him -- but disarmingly female.

She would think he had done this on purpose; locked himself, naked, in a public building. She would think he was a perverted individual. He scrambled to think of a dignified explanation for his presence, but there was no time to think. There was no escape. She had entered the room, and she appeared to be examining him with her eyes. She began walking toward him.

He had expected a man. An office worker. A guard. In light of the surprise, his mental resources were strangely divided between his awkward situation and the rim of her glasses.

And the column of light blue buttons on her collared shirt. And her ponytail. And the edges of her lips.

"Good morning," she offered calmly. At this, Scott felt slightly more comfortable and then felt his internal defenses relax.

But before he could think of what to say, the woman placed her hands in the hollows of his over-exposed underarms, and her fingernails traced quick designs within them.

In the first tenth of a second afterward, Scott's mind began to formulate the thought:

W-wha...?

And in the second tenth of a second -- though he didn't know why -- he realized what she was trying to do.

She's trying to tickle you. Just pretend you don't understand, and you won't have to show how ticklish you are.

Unfortunately, while the timescale of tenths of a second were sufficient for his thoughts to construct themselves, it would not outlast the woman's fingernails. His pretending bought him another six tenths of a second, and the smile tugging at his lips worked against him from the very beginning of that interval.

Since he was thirteen, Scott had spent nights fantasizing about his body in total helplessness. Whichever demure bookworm he admired at the time would begin poised above him, smiling with piercing confidence, dancing her fingers under his arms or around his stomach. Eventually, she would remove his socks and shoes -- a circumstance he had associated with an acute emotional vulnerability -- and exploit the soles of his feet with complacent eye contact.

Now he was 19, but all this had remained private. He had never even considered the possibility of telling another human. When his fantasies were through, they would drift back into his mind and stay there. He would never quit Firefox without clearing his browsing history. Even to Kristen, the deeply warm girl with whom he had developed a relationship, he had given no hint. He would never dare to impose such thoughts on her. Perhaps after several years, he would consider admitting that the sight of her bare feet on the concrete school steps was a factor in attracting him to her... but perhaps not.

It was easy not to. For he had learned this rule about the world: what people were not allowed to know, they would never think of. His sexual desire would be easy to keep secret, so long as he took meticulous care to volunteer no evidence of it. So, he felt safe in the knowledge that to his family, his classmates, or his girlfriend, he would appear to be just a normal person.

He had the same advantage over this strange, pretty woman. She had exposed his body, binding his wrists and ankles in the most compromising position he could imagine. Even his penis and testicles were in plain view. In spite of all of this -- no matter why she had done it -- she had no power over him. She could produce no restraints that would expose his thoughts.

So, his mind passed him the confident message that he did not need to accept this abusive treatment from her. And he threw his body mightily to one side, with the full intention of tipping the table onto the floor.

Nothing happened. He had tested his bonds before, but -- to be honest with himself -- he had not exerted a full effort at the time. Instead, he was again reminded of the feeling of his babysitter sitting on him. Only this was much firmer. It felt like there was a babysitter on each leg, and another on each arm.

He laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

The woman stopped, and he was left in a helpless heap of gasping giggles. He could hardly think, but he was determined to prepare an authoritative response.

Where am I? Who is responsible for keeping me here? ... he rehearsed.

"My name is Jessica," she said in a professionally charming manner. "It's a pleasure to work with you, Scott." When she finished speaking, she kept her eyes directly focused on his.

He suddenly felt nervous. Why had she said it in that way? Why wasn't she looking away? Then he remembered he had been working on sounding authoritative, and tried to speak what he had practised.

"H-hi," came out of his mouth.

"Uhm... can you--" he added, and immediately found himself tightening his body as Jessica's fingers were placed on his ribs. The pull of his muscles accomplished very little, except to produce the opposite force from the straps on his arms. The sense of defenselessness overtook him.

Tenths of a second played no role in Scott's reaction this time. It was immediate, and the laughter flowed like a healthy waterfall. He tested his ability to speak, but his mouth had decided on the shape of a wide-open smile.

"It's going to be important that you mind your manners, Scott. If you don't listen to the instructions, then we'll have to start all over. If you begin a sentence in words, you'll end it in laughter. Very much like this laughter which you are so kindly demonstrating now."

She lightly kneaded his skin for a little while, allowing him the opportunity to fathom his kind demonstration. After about twenty very aerobic seconds, she relented and stood over him with acute eyes.

"Any questions?" she asked airily as he gasped and panted beneath her.

He was caught in her strange eye contact. He couldn't tell whether she was daring him to speak, or genuinely offering him the chance to learn about his situation. What did she mean by that subtle hint of a smirk? Was it triumph at her position of power, or could it be... a sign of caring?

He decided that it was a sign of caring.

"Um, look," he said. "I really--"

The female hands were deftly reapplied to his body, and once again, he was in the same predicament as before. He laughed as though he was passionate about laughing. But, even though she made him writhe and work, he could still hear the voice of his own mind reassure him.

She is so presumptuous. She thinks she can trick me, it said. Fine; I'll play her game. I won't talk. But she will never know I think about tickling, and she'll never even know that she doesn't know.

It was almost a full minute before Jessica decided that she would relinquish control of Scott's body back to him, and for the third time he was smiling through soft hiccoughs. But this time, he smiled in irony, in the knowledge that she would never gain any ground.

Suppose she was a kidnapper, preying on random samples of the population, placing them in compromising situations in order to expose their secret desire to be tickled helplessly. He had read about such people, albeit in fiction. Now that he'd had time to think about it, it seemed impossible that that was not her goal. It was too unlikely that she would orchestrate such a situation for any other purpose. Exactly why, he would wait to learn.

And even then, it wouldn't matter. As long as it was him and his mind together, he would never need to reveal a thing. The effect of the tickling had died away, and now his smile was completely voluntary. All he had to do was wait until Jessica got tired of this, and set him free.

Jessica was still looking right at him. Her own smile seemed to be a mocking mirror of his.

"I trust we can continue properly," she told him, holding up what looked like an over-thick rubber band, attached to a cord.

A ring, his mind commented. A ring on a string.

He snickered inside, equating his ability to be mentally whimsical with control of his own will. Jessica actually seemed to think that she was intimidating him.

"This is a penile strain gauge," she told him, threading her index finger and thumb through the ring. She began to slowly pull them apart. "Any stretching or relaxation of the ring can be measured precisely." Her eyebrows raised slightly, and her smirk perked up a little. It got to Scott, the way she combined the persona of the fascinated intellectual with the interrogator.

Then, she made physical contact with his penis by lifting it from his body. She passed it lightly from one hand to the other as she placed the ring over it. The ring was passed down her fingers and rested at the base of the shaft.

Scott had not paid any attention to the equipment which sat on the cart to his right. The plainly visible LCD display showed a golden dot travelling calmly from left to right on the screen, and then repeating itself.

"I hope you can tell I'm serious," said Jessica. "And I see you understand that you shouldn't be speaking right now. I also know that if you dared to say anything else, you would begin by asking who I am, and why I have you strapped down like this."

His mind silently confirmed that she was right; he had already thought those words the first time she had tickled him.

"I am a private researcher. My clients hire me to investigate a target, and my task is to discover their sexually deviant traits."

He was proud to learn that he was close in his guess, but now that she had really said it, the sound of her voice made Scott feel chilly inside. But she won't get anywhere, his mind repeated once again. She'll just have to let me go when she realizes I'm just a normal person.

"I want you to think of me as your friend, Scott," Jessica said. "And as your friend, I know you have feelings. There are things that intrigue you."

Jessica adjusted her glasses on her nose. It was a cute nose, and it gave Scott's mind one more thing to do: try to ignore its shape as she came closer to him.

"People reveal their feelings to their friends, like you're about to do."

The words soaked into Scott's brain like a warm hug. He wasn't sure what she was going to do... he just needed to make sure he was ready to dig in his heels when she did it. He had read plenty of stories in the privacy of his room, in which a fictional victim was forced to reveal his turn-ons to a captor by their own display of sexual arousal. But Scott knew that fiction differed from reality. For example, had already endured three intense tickling sessions, and his body had shown no sexual response. If any stimulus would have made it do so, he thought it would probably be the continued visibility of Jessica's face as she talked to him.

But that was only a thought. This was a serious, real situation, and whatever Jessica was, she was not a mind-reader.

"I'm going to ask you a question," she said. "You can answer it out loud, and I won't tickle you."

She was going to the equipment, so he looked at the screen and heard her type.

The image was replaced with a picture that he had seen before, but it was so surreal to see it here that he almost wondered whether he was dreaming. It was a young woman, situated outdoors in a flowy dress, with her bare feet protruding from stocks and her arms over her head. A feather was in mid-stroke up one of the feet, and the eyes were closed. The mouth was open, its shape the sweet result of the combined forces of a powerful ticklish reflex and erotic embarrassment.

"Have you ever seen this picture, Scott?"

Scott felt the most piercing jolt of shame and panic he had ever experienced. The way she said it sounded so practised. He knew from her tone, that she knew he was familiar with it. His prowess for the mental fencing match drained rapidly from his body through the floor. It would be very tricky to say "no" convincingly.

"I downloaded this by connecting to your wireless network and accessing your 'Records' folder in your 'My Documents' folder. WEP encryption is okay for everyday purposes, but you should know better if you're trying to keep yourself safe from curious friends interested in learning your sexual fetishes, don't you think?"

Scott had read the word "humiliation" before. He had even used it in writing. Now, finally, he understood it. The reality of his situation suddenly hit him.

Naked. Exposed. Beautiful, intelligent girl. Playing with him. Humiliating him.

"I told you could answer that question and I wouldn't tickle you, Scott. What's the matter?"

There was no answer. All that was left was to focus on a spot on the wall, but he predicted that this would be equally transparent.

"No answer? Well, how about this one?" said Jessica lightly, and advanced the image, and he looked reflexively. This one included a gleeful-looking girl trying to jolt sideways out of her restraints as another woman's nails chased her underarm.

"It looks like you've got some secrets, Scott. Why do you try so hard to hide them?"

The next image was particularly erotic to him; it was a college-aged girl on her back, legs bent to right angles and restrained, and another girl tickling the feet. The feet were frozen in a splay that had fascinated him the first time he saw it, and it seemed to match the joyful expression in which her face was frozen.

Jessica knelt by his ear, and spoke softly.

"I think, Scott, that you don't want to hide them. Deep down, you want people to know. Shall we test this? It's one of my favourite tests. And if you really want to keep hiding it, it will be no problem for you."

Scott looked away from the picture and focused on the ceiling.

"Listen carefully to my instructions," she recited clinically. "Think about tickling."

He tried to block her out with his mind, but -- for the first time -- he couldn't find his mind. There was only him.

"Tickling. Ticklish underarms. Ticklish feet."

His attention deferred to the words like iron filings to magnets.

"Now, try not to get an erection. Don't get an erection. Try not to get an erection."

Scott hadn't even been thinking about that, but the moment Jessica had said "erection," he realized that energy was rushing to his penis. He willed it immediately to stop, but it was not a case of willing it. It was a case of watching it happen.

He felt it quickly rest in its new position, pointing at the ceiling as if truly proud to put its owner's arousal on display.

Scott blushed fiercely.

Jessica smirked with a little snicker. "I knew you'd like that test," she commented. Then she made her way back to the equipment cart, and switched the display to show a close shot of the underside of an erect penis with a thin ring at the base, testicles hanging underneath. It took Scott a moment to understand that it was his own. There must have been a camera located on the apparatus separating his ankles.

"I see you're examining the results for yourself," she said. "The video recording is pretty conclusive, but in case we want details, the movements of your penis were measured precisely. You achieved a full erection in less than four seconds, Scott. You must really want to tell me that you're intrigued by the concept of tickling."

"Isn't it interesting, how you can't put it away?" she continued, letting him feel her eyes on his red face. "This must be so embarrassing for you."

Scott almost moaned.

Jessica stood up again.

"I'm going to tickle your feet now, Scott."

Scott made eye contact with her for a moment, and then regretted it, looking away. Her face was so cute, and it was so frustrating that that even mattered.

"Well, I'll do it in a minute. I just wanted the machine to record your reaction when you heard me say that. When you're especially turned on by a stimulus, your body tries to continue expanding your penis, and it appears as a slight spike on the readout. Thanks for doing that for me just now."

Scott didn't move. He just blushed.

"For letting me see what happens when I say... I'm going to tickle your feet now, Scott."

And the image on the LCD changed again, so that he could see his own bare feet for the first time, soles facing the camera at a slight angle. He finally understood the constricted feeling around his ankles. They were held firmly all around by the padded holes from which they protruded, and some kind of material was threaded around each toe.

"Oh, and guess what, Scott?" she said, walking around and kneeling by his ear again. Reaching under the head of the table, she adjusted something with her hand. Scott felt a new tension below his ankles, and was forced to look at the on-screen image. A bar was pressing against the tops of his feet, forcing them to point slightly, and the looped material was slowly tightening, pulling his toes back. The shot created the appearance that he was presenting the balls of his feet.

Her mouth by his ear, Jessica whispered sensually this time.

"I'm going to tickle... your helpless... bare... feet."

The room was so silent that the involuntary twitch of the prominently-displayed penis seemed loud by comparison.